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Woolly mammoth
|Reported=Unknown }}The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was a species of shaggy-haired, long-tusked elephant native to much of the Northern Hemisphere until at least 4,000 years ago. Although regarded as an icon of extinction, some cryptozoologists suggest it may still exist in the remote n taiga, based on a number of sightings. There are also older reports from Alaska and the more southern , which may be confused with accounts of surviving mastodons. Unless a report specifically seems to refer to either a mammoth or a mastodon, sightings of hairy elephants in Arctic and subarctic regions are here classed as mammoth sightings. Sightings 579 In 579, "a gigantic elephant with long, black hair" was supposedly captured in Yanzhou, . In commemoration of this event, the era name was changed to Daxiang ("great elephant"). 1580 In 1580, a police mission of Cossacks under Yermak Timofeyevitch was dispatched to Siberia to restore order at a Stroganoff salt mine which was being repeatedly pillaged by brigands. This expedition would eventually lead to the Russian conquest of Siberia. Near to the beginning of the mission, Timofeyevitch reported seeing "a large hairy elephant" beyond the Urals, which the natives told him was one of the treasures of the Khanate of Sibir, which was much valued as food, resulting in the name "mountain of meat". 1918 One of the most detailed and, in some views, most convincing reports of a surviving mammoth comes from 1920, when a Russian hunter recounted a sighting of a pair of hairy elephants, which he had come across in the forest in 1918, to M. L. Gallon, the French consul at Vladivostok. The unnamed hunter had spent four years in a region of vast taiga where people rarely ventured, and Gallon described him as "almost illiterate": when he mentioned the name "mammoth" to the hunter after hearing his story, the man "did not show the least sign that he understood what I meant". The hunter told Gallon that, during his second year in the taiga, he noticed a trail of huge tracks, followed by a dung heap: The hunter followed the track for "days and days," sometimes seeing where the animal had stopped "in some grassy clearing and then had gone on forever eastward". Eventually, he discovered another track almost exactly the same, coming from the north and crossing the original track. From the look of the tracks, the hunter deduced that both animals had been either excited or upset at their meeting, and had then set out eastwards, one following some 20 metres behind the other. He continued following the tracks "for days and days," apprehensive that perhaps he would never see the animals, or that they could injure him, as he had only five cartridges left in his gun. The weather was also growing much colder, and he could only keep himself warm by drinking scalding tea and building himself a naida, a tent of leaves and branches, every night. Nevertheless, he followed the trail, and noticed that he was gaining on the animals, as the tracks were becoming ever-fresher. Finally, one afternoon, the tracks were clear enough to show that he was close to the animals. Approaching with the wind in his face, he suddenly came across the animals, and hid himself behind a big larch. He set down his bag and readied both his gun and his axe, for protection, and continued to observe the animals. When evening came, it became to cold for him to stay, and he reluctantly left. When he returned the next morning, the animals were gone, and since winter had set in and the weather had become bitterly cold, he gave up on tracking them and left to find a sheltered place to spend the winter. 1922 The Evenk people of northeastern Siberia had "well-preserved" mammoth skins at the beginning of the 20th Century, and "faithfully described the appearance and behaviour of the mammoth ... and even detailed the beast's diet and how they hunted it". A 1922 Russian expedition also collected accounts of living mammoths from the Evenks, including a sighting in which the Evenks had seen one that year, along the Arctic Ocean coast.Nature 362 (1993)"Reassessing the Marvellous Mammoths," The Age (29 March 1993) 1944 A number of pilots flying from Alaska to Moscow in 1944 are reported to have seen a herd of mammoths walking single file in the snow. 1956 A schoolmistress at a small village near Russia's Taz River claimed to have encountered a mammoth in 1956, whilst picking mushrooms. She said that the animal approached within 10 metres of her. 1989 A hunter claimed to have seen two groups of mammoths, each consisting of three individuals, in 1989. 1998 A party of gold prospectors reported seeing a herd of mammoths near a tributary of the Indigirka River in Yakutia. Confirmed hoaxes In October 1899, a short story called The Killing of the Mammoth was published in McClure's Magazine, written from the point of view of a hunter named Tukeman, who hunts down and kills "the last mammoth". Although labelled as fiction, a large number of people took the story as real, and wrote letters to the Smithsonian to express their outrage that the last mammoth had been killed, leading McClure's Magazine to publish a statement affirming that the story was a work of fiction.The Great Mammoth Hoax (1899) hoaxes.org 8 June 2019Besse, Nancy L. "The Great Mammoth Hoax," Alaska Journal 10 (4) (1980) Notes and references Category:Cryptids Category:Proposed living fossils Category:Asia Category:North America Category:Canada Category:China Category:Russia Category:United States - Alaska Category:Proboscideans Category:Latest fossil: Holocene Category:Theory: Living fossil - Mammoth